Precision Ag Tech Could Prove Challenging With WiFi

It’s hard to envision a future of agriculture that doesn’t heavily involve advanced technology and data for farmers both big and small.

Nick Tindall of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers said there are now 6-10 onboard computers with more computer code than the space shuttle on farm machinery.

“We expect, in the next 100 years, to see more productivity gains from the manipulation of big data than we saw in the past 100 years from mechanization.”

There are challenges though, and they are tied to other difficulties of being in rural America, access to high speed internet.

Tindall said that’s the biggest obstacle to advancing what we know.

“That future where we’re collecting data points on every single plant on every single field from the time it’s planted to the time it’s harvested and manipulating that to create real-time actionable data is only possible if we have wireless connectivity in those fields to upload telemetrics data, to have the transfer of that soil information to your agronomist.”

The fix is to create fast and reliable internet and wireless capabilities in rural America according to Tindall.